At the center of Amazon's brilliant new sci-fi series Outer Range is a vast empty space, literally at first and then figuratively at the end. In the vast expanse of Wyoming, between two rival farms, there is a complex hole in the ground, the meaning of which is unknown. It confuses and compels those who come with us for a while, until, by the end of eight frustrating and randomly paced episodes, exhaustion sets in. Despite the unusually gorgeous visuals and hard work that insists otherwise, there's really nothing on the bottom.
Powering us through any drip-fed mystery box show, from Lost to the most recent Severance, is an intense, often unrelenting, desire to find out what lies at its center, a desire so strong that it needs to grow. You should go ahead with impatience. There's plenty of intrigue here, with an opening episode that begins as a Yellowstone-style western before lurching into a cross between an Ozark-adjacent crime drama and a Stranger Things-esque sci-fi fantasy. At the very least, it's an unexpected brew.
Josh Brolin, riding a high style following Deadpool 2 and Dune and snapping half a world into the Marvel universe, takes on the role of Royal, a grizzled rancher (is there any other type?) fully formed and whole. Kind of terrible hole comes in. Land. Where it goes and what it means remains to be determined, but its discovery coincides with the arrival of a mysterious visitor, played by Imogen Poots, and legal action is taken to reclaim that land. The news in which it lies, driven by his cynical neighbor, played out. A cranked-up-to-11 by Will Patton. It would be unfair to follow what-what-what-the-hell, drifting far into spoiler territory, and really difficult, considering how opaque so much of the show is.
While Outer Range can bear the dazzling aesthetic of high-end prestige television – it is produced by Brad Pitt's Oscar-winning Plan B production company and, more rarely for a streaming show, more like a film than a series. Looks - its barely explained collection oddities keep it closer to a typical genre show - the SyFy channel with a budget, if you want. The contrasts are thick and sharp, both in the show's scrappy plotting (which in some episodes feels less like plotting and more like a weird thing after another weird thing) and how the story is told and done. One character repeatedly breaks into songs to sing pop and soft rock classics, and other actors often resort to long, exaggerated screams at the sky.
To further confuse its tone and us as an audience, it is composed and mostly written by playwright, Juilliard alum Brian Watkins, meant to deliver character stage monologues often, if not to the end. Will stop If all of this sounds distracting, he barely scratches the surface, and soon in the series, all that initial raised-eye intrigue, which is "What am I seeing?" Allows for an unrivaled but compelling sense of humor, melting into a pool of annoyance and nostalgia.
Brolin's dependable shoulders carry the load of the show efficiently enough, even if none of this is really a stretch for him, but Poots, a very tough character to work with, works just the way he intended. and the lightning should spark their sparring is rapidly extinguished. It's also disappointing that Outskirts has brutally underplayed two of the best female actors: Lily Taylor as Brolin's wife suffering a debilitating crisis of faith and the brilliant Deirdre O'Connell, who most recently starred in Dana H. in a standout performance on Broadway and who is only allowed to briefly transform it as a vengeful matriarch before being sidelined.
As much a leftfield of the show as it may be, it's still trying very hard to be a character-based family drama, but when it feels like an escalation of so many moments, not to build the story towards something, it's not really. It's hard to find anything in but control.
Taken in isolation, some awkwardness is often dominant and it's actually a real pleasure to watch a show that deviates from the crushed flatness of so much streaming content. Even without the heavy lifting done by tough-to-screw-up locations, it's built with an eye on artistry that more small-screen directors can afford to adopt.
But the eye-catching visuals serve to remind us of the lack of magnetism elsewhere the show is trying to say something about fate, faith and family but falling short of depth on all counts. As is now usually the case with the over-expansion of the television world, far beyond the breaking point, perhaps, surely, buried here is a more effective two-hour film, shrouded in padding. In a bloated eight-episode run, that's just not the limit.